Once you receive an ITA, your MyCIC account will show additional tabs that will allow you to continue with your e-APR. As mentioned earlier, you have 60 days to respond to your ITA. With Express Entry, the final submission of application is now done electronically.
Submitting Post ITA application (e-APR)
A lot of information that you need to submit in your e-APR will be pre-populated from your Express Entry profile. In addition to information already provided in EE profile, you will be required to to fill additional information regarding your family members, work history, travel history, personal history and address history.
A single applicant will likely be able to finish Express Entry e-APR forms in roughly 3-5 hours, if all information and dates are readily available. This is also dependent on the number of entries related to family members, work history, travel history, personal history and address history.
Once all the forms are completed, a Personalized Checklist is generated. As mentioned earlier, personalized checklist is dynamic and some of the entries in the list change based on the information that you have provided in the previous sections of e-APR e.g work experience letters. You dot have to complete the process in one sitting. You can save and return later based on your ITA validity.
When you have gathered all documents that were requested in your Personalized Checklist, you should upload them using the “upload file” tab in your Document checklist page. Note that document upload section comes towards the end of the e-APR submission process and allows for only 1 file to be uploaded for each section. So if you have multiple documents that pertain to the same section, then you should scan and merge your documents into 1 file. The file formats you can upload are .tiff, .jpg, .doc, .docx and .pdf. The maximum file size restriction is 4 MB. There are tons of free sources to convert, merge and compress PDFs.
Once you have uploaded all requested documents, the system will take you to pages related to Declaration, Disclosure and Electronic signature. “Agree” to the Declaration, Disclosure and Electronic signature pages and you will see a table with summary of fees that you need to pay for your e-APR. You have two hours to complete the payment (further instructions and options are available on this page). You can pay your fees using Visa, American Express or Mastercard credit card.
Your payment completion is the final step in your e-APR. Your payment reference number and confirmation of online application transmission will be sent to you as notification (message) in your MyCIC account (Notification title “Confirmation of Online Application Transmission” ).
Depending on case to case CIC will send another notification (within a few hours to a few days) titled “Acknowledgement of receipt – Application for permanent residence -” which serves as a confirmation that your application for permanent residence in Canada was received by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and they have created a file with your application number. This is more popularly called as AOR date and is the date from when your 6 months intended processing time begins.
Once your application is submitted you can regularly monitor progress by logging into your MyCIC account. CIC aims to process most of the completed applications within 6 months of receiving a completed application.
You can check official CIC processing times in the link below to determine if your application has crossed the standard processing time : http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/information/times/
After your AOR you must report any significant change to your circumstances to CIC, especially :
Change in circumstances such as the loss of a job offer or a Provincial or Territorial nomination; Change in family composition including new born children, adopted children, divorce, marriage etc; Change of address, including change of e-mail address; Change of immigration representative; Request to withdraw your application; CIC (IRCC) will check and verify the information that you have provided in your application. This includes your program eligibility, CRS scores, medical checks, police certificates, work experience, ECA, educational history, language scores, settlement funds, your personal history etc. You will be notified via MyCIC if CIC needs any additional information or if your application is updated. If everything in your application satisfies IRCC officers, then you will receive a “Passport request” (commonly called PPR) notification in your MyCIC which essentially is a request for your passport to be Stamped with your Canadian PR visa.
All the best!